Pigeon Street

PIGEON STREET
Made by: David Yates
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1982 onwards

Theme tune: “If you lived in Pigeon Street/Here are the people you could meet/Here are the people who would say hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye/Every day…”

Pigeon Street, narrated by George Layton, was one of the giants of children’s TV in the 1980s - even though there were very few pigeons to be seen. The residents of Pigeon Street were not your average neighbourhood, which probably won’t come as a great surprise. The person everyone remembers is Long Distance Clara, the long-haul truck driver with her own catchy song - she was ever so slightly sexy too, and her lucky husband was Hugo the Chef, who stayed at home in a very modern role-reversal. There was also Dr Glossop, bald as a coot, who lived with his wife and their son Gerald, and twin daughters Molly and Polly, with their lettered jumpers. The twins also had a memorable song and I’m going to have to recount it for you: “Molly and Polly are two of a kind/They look both the same when they’re seen from behind/But when they turn round, it’s easy to see/It’s Molly with an M, and Polly with a P”. Thank you, I’m here every Thursday.

Anyway, moving swiftly on, there was also Mr McAdoo, the pet shop owner, who always had a pencil behind his ear; Rose and Daisy, the dotty old women who liked keep-fit; Reg the park-keeper and his wife Doreen, who were keen on ballroom dancing; and Bob, the bike-shop owner, who looked like he might have been at Woodstock. Of course, there was the token black family, made up of William the window-cleaner, his wife Betty, and their adolescent son, Jim. Finally, there was a pair of elderly madmen called Mr Jupiter and Mr Baskerville. If you can’t deduce their hobbies from their names, Mr Jupiter was an amateur astronomer with a telescope and a dog called Flash, and according to the song “looks high” (mmm..); whereas, Mr Baskerville was an amateur sleuth with a magnifying glass and a dog called Watson, and he was inclined to “look low.” They were not, however, as those misleading lyric excerpts might suggest, a drug addict and a manic-depressive.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 8/10

(Thanks to www.jedisparadise.co.uk for the borrowed pic)